this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
55 points (98.2% liked)

Comradeship // Freechat

2771 readers
18 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The book I am talking about is "The Gulag Archipelago"

See the screenshot (marked text) first. If the book has the power to change your memories so you can't distinguish between what you experienced and what you read, isn't that basically manipulation?

I know that something similar is possible for example with altered photos of you childhood that can trick your memories of the time, for example some object that you were told to have but you didn't.

top 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The author's also an open and proud fascist.

[–] DonLongSchlong@lemmygrad.ml 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I think his ex wife also said that it's just embellished stories if not completely made up. Let me see if i can find it

Edit:

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html

She said its "folklore" and its significance "overstated"

[–] Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's basically the Uyghur Genocide rhetoric of 20th century.

[–] REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 2 months ago

That would be the Holodomor myth.

[–] marl_karx@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This book is mandatory reading in schools in Russia since about 2010 if i recall correctly, just why :(

[–] Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 2 months ago

The democracy of the bourgeoisie at play.

[–] Vertraumir@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 months ago

It is, and some other his books

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

my favorite part about the gulag archipelago is how Ernest Mandel's refutation of the gulag Archipelago mentions that several of the examples Solzhenitsyn gives of the terrible authoritarianism are actually examples of the Soviet State stepping in to PREVENT the abuse of authority

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/solzhenitsyn-gulag.html

[–] AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Using Solzhenitsyn's words against him is good and all, but the rest of this is Trot-trot-trot. It's only the most extreme Khrushchovite claims strung together in an attempt to, what? Defend the practices of the first few years to undermine the following 3 decades?

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Who cares if he says some trotskyite anti stalin shit when the tl;dr is "Solzhenitsyn literally undermines his own point by giving examples that counter his own claims in his own book of lies"

Stalin and the latter decades of the USSR aren't on trial here, Solzhenitsyn's lies are

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are better ways to debunk Solzhenitsyn than to say "everything was fine under Lenin, it's actually under Stalin that things became bad".

You do far more damage to the communist cause when you say nonsense like "Stalinist counterrevolution" than you undo by pointing out a few inconsistencies in a work of anti-communist propaganda fiction.

In drawing a false distinction between the "good Lenin" and the "bad Stalin", in denying the continuity of the revolution and socialist construction between the two periods, this text implicitly gives credence to everything Solzhenitsyn writes about the Stalin era Gulag system.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It confirms that, for the anti-communists, the historical facts are not what is actually important, it's only the "feeling" they get when thinking about socialism that matters. That they not only try to convince others but even themselves to believe that things happened which never actually did, merely because it validates their emotions.

This is indicative of cult-like social conditioning, in which you are told to reject even your own memories when they don't confirm to the cult-endorsed narrative, and replace them with the fiction the cult tells you is what you actually experienced. Unfortunately this is a common phenomenon in post-socialist countries nowadays

You will encounter people who lived through those times and who were perfectly happy at the time, but who have been so socially and psychologically pressured year after year to accept the narrative that communism was terrible and they were actually oppressed, that eventually they internalize this to a point that it changes their memories.

It's a form of mass psychological abuse.

[–] optissima@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah that has very much so a "this added a narrative I like to my disconnected anecdotal experiences" which makes it easier to recall, warping the original memories. Christianity does this too, adding an easy narrative to the seemingly random suffering people go through.

[–] big_spoon@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ackchually, it's not propaganda if it talks about the evuls of gommunism...because they could have happened (and if they didn't it doesn't matter)

[–] 6kb_@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 months ago

Their TotallyTarian Propaganda: Women, men; all are welcome to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism, the yoke of the bourgeioisie, and we must stay united in this effort: noone can embark alone on this journey.

Other Equally Bad Evil TotallyTarian Propaganda: All Jews, all Browns, all Blacks, all lesser! Let every woman in your neighborhood become producers of the next pure Aryan nation!

Our Pure Fact Based Narratives, Funded By Our Free State (the CIA): The last two are equally bad and maybe the first one’s worse, because imagine that guy was like, Hitler, like Stalin was,